Metareview: Black (PS2/Xbox)

[wraggster]

EA's much trumpeted "gun porn" first-person shooter hits the shelves this week, so we thought it'd be a good idea to compile the thoughts of a selection of reviews from the web. Overall, Game Rankings gives Black a good score of 79%, but does it live up to the hype?

IGN (87/100) by Chris Roper - this interview can be summed up by the statement that Black "is everything you'd ever want in a shooter if all you ever wanted to do was shoot stuff". In other words Black is the Serious Sam of the PS2/Xbox (read: irrelevant plot, limited replayabilty but with plenty of pretty guns, gore and explosions to stop you from caring).

EuroGamer (80/100) by Kristan Reed - this review plays the statistics game to point out the hectic nature of the game. By the end of Black, reviewer Kristan Reed had killed a total of 2758 enemies equating to one kill every ten seconds. This kill count wasn't easily earned; the A.I. in Black is pretty tough. Unfortunately the lack of a plot to explain why the hell you have to kill all these people lets the game down. That plus the absence of a multiplayer mode and the occasional slowdown due to unoptimized code (or the PS2's aging hardware) means that Black doesn't quite fall into the genre defining category.

1UP (70/100) by Garnett Lee - "Do you like to blow stuff up?" If you do, then Black is the game for you. According to this review, Black elevates shooting things/blowing things up to an almost artistic level. But if you're looking for more of a Half-Life style experience from your shooters, Black won't satisfy you - unless you have the ability to switch off your brain.

[trezzer]

Hmm... I pretty much thought Serious Sam *was* the Serious Sam of the Xbox / PS2. But what do I know? 8)

Black is pretty far from Serious Sam in reality. Sure, there are lots of people to kill and extravagant ways to do it, but it's far from the DOOM-like hordes in Serious Sam that blindly rush towards you.

If anything this feels like the original Medal of Honor without the WW2 setting and with more explosives. I love Black - and the Xbox version doesn't seem to have the slowdowns the PS2 suffers from (surprise surprise, eh?).

[SmashinGit]

I'm kind of disappointed that there is no multiplayer, as the game is quite short multiplayer would of added some extra life to it.